The Last of Us PC Requirements and Best Settings

This vertical has told you which version of The Last of Us to buy, how No Return and Factions play, and what changed between the PS3 original and the remakes. What it has never told you is what your PC actually needs to run any of it, or what to change in the settings menu once it is installed. The versions guide notes that the PC launch was rough and got patched — one paragraph, no numbers. This is the PC-specific piece: official spec tiers for both ports, exactly which upscaler each one supports, whether a Steam Deck can actually run this, and the patch history that turned Part I from a 59-Metacritic launch into the clean build you would buy today.

Two different PC ports, two different asks

The Last of Us Part I and The Last of Us Part II Remastered are separate Steam and Epic Games Store listings, with separate installs, separate save files and separate patch histories. Buying one does not get you the other, and a fix that landed in one game's patch notes did not automatically land in the sibling's. Part I is the 2022 remake of the 2013 original, built on the Part II engine, and it hit PC on March 28, 2023. Part II Remastered is the PS5 remaster of the 2020 sequel, and it hit PC over two years later, on April 3, 2025. Treat everything below as two separate buying decisions, because the hardware bar and the feature list are not identical.

The Last of Us Part I requirements by tier

Naughty Dog and porting studio Iron Galaxy publish four official tiers on the PlayStation PC page, not the usual two:

Two things worth flagging before you check your own rig against this. First, 16GB of RAM is the floor at every resolution up to 1440p — this is not a game you can run comfortably on 8GB no matter how strong your GPU is. Second, the jump from Recommended to Performance is mostly a RAM and CPU upgrade rather than a GPU one; a 3060-class card is asked to do 1080p60 and 1440p60 both, just with a beefier CPU feeding it in the second case.

Part II Remastered requirements by tier

Part II Remastered ships the same four-tier structure, and asks for noticeably less GPU at the low end because it is a remaster of a PS4-generation game rather than a ground-up remake:

The headline number to plan storage around is 150GB, half again as much as Part I's 100GB, and Naughty Dog recommends an SSD for both — the minimum tier will technically install to a hard drive, but load times and texture streaming suffer for it. Note the Minimum tier's GTX 1650 is a genuinely low bar for a PS5-generation remaster; that is the card Naughty Dog itself lists, not a fan estimate.

What each game actually supports for upscaling

This is where the two ports diverge the most, because Part I launched in 2023 with what was current then and grew its upscaler support patch by patch, while Part II Remastered launched in April 2025 already carrying the newer stack:

The ray tracing row matters because it is easy to assume a 2025 remaster on a good GPU ships it — it does not, in either game. If you have seen ray-traced screenshots of Part II Remastered online, that is the Complete RT community shader mod, not anything Naughty Dog shipped.

Best settings for mid-range hardware

Naughty Dog does not publish a "best settings" list, so the closest thing to an authoritative answer is outlet benchmarking. PCGamesN's testing on an RTX 4070 at 1080p found the Ultra preset averaging 97fps and the High preset averaging 119fps, with only a further roughly 10fps gain from dropping to Medium — a small enough difference that the outlet recommends staying off Medium and above the Low preset entirely, since Low introduces visible texture popping. Enabling DLSS in Balanced mode was worth roughly a 40% frame rate increase in the same testing while keeping the image clean at 60fps and above.

If you are settings-limited rather than framerate-limited, prioritize character and texture quality over shadow and ambient occlusion settings — Naughty Dog built Part I's remake specifically around a full performance-capture pipeline for facial animation, and the campaign's dialogue scenes hold on Ellie and Joel's faces at close range throughout, which is exactly where that setting shows. Draw distance is comparatively safe to reduce, especially in the game's many interior and corridor sections where nothing is far enough away to notice.

Steam Deck: verified, but budget your settings

Both games carry Valve's Steam Deck Verified badge today, but they got there on very different timelines. Part I launched on March 28, 2023 without Deck support and did not earn Verified status until patch v1.1.0 on June 13, 2023 — a patch that also fixed crashes, a HUD display bug and a memory leak that had been causing Deck crashes specifically. Part II Remastered, by contrast, was rated Steam Deck Verified before its PC release even shipped, announced around March 31, 2025 ahead of the April 3 launch.

Verified does not mean effortless. Naughty Dog's own recommendation, echoed by outlet testing including PCGamesN's, is to accept the auto-detected graphics profile Steam Deck prompts you with on first launch rather than hand-tuning individual sliders, and to set FSR to Quality rather than chasing a higher framerate through a lower internal resolution — Performance and Ultra Performance FSR modes on Deck's 800p screen introduce a soft, blurry image that is a worse trade than a few missing frames. Realistic expectations on the stock Deck are 30fps in most scenes with drops during heavy combat encounters. None of this is Naughty Dog's official guidance — it is outlet testing on a device with a fixed, modest CPU budget running a AAA-tier game, and your mileage inside any specific encounter will vary.

The patch history that fixed the PC launch

Part I's PC version launched at 59 on Metacritic against the PS5 version's 89 — a 30-point gap for the same game, driven by shader compilation stalls, crashes and graphical glitches. That gap closed over roughly two and a half years of patches:

Part II Remastered's PC launch was cleaner, and its patch cadence since April 2025 has mostly been maintenance rather than a repair job:

If the 2023 PC reviews are the reason you have been holding off on Part I, that reputation predates five point-releases — most recently v1.1.5 in July 2025 — that targeted exactly the crashes and stalls those reviews cited.

Storage, and no Denuvo to fight

Neither PC port uses Denuvo or any comparable always-on DRM layer. That will not affect your performance, but it does mean you are not paying the small but real frame-time tax some Denuvo-protected games carry, and it is one less background process competing for CPU cycles on a Steam Deck or a budget rig. Budget storage as two separate 100GB-plus installs rather than one: Part I asks for 100GB, Part II Remastered asks for 150GB, and there is no shared-asset install that lets owning one shrink the other's footprint.

Quick Action Checklist

• Treat Part I and Part II Remastered as two separate purchases and two separate installs — nothing about owning one lowers the other's requirements or storage cost.
• Budget 16GB of RAM as an absolute floor for either game up to 1440p, and 32GB if you are targeting the 4K/Very High tier in either one.
• On Part I, remember Frame Generation only works through FSR's own Super Resolution — it will not pair with DLSS.
• On Part II Remastered, check the NVIDIA App for the DLSS 4 Transformer model override if you own an RTX card; the in-game DLSS toggle alone will not give you the newer model.
• Neither game supports ray tracing officially — anything you have seen with ray-traced lighting is the unofficial Complete RT mod, not a shipped feature.
• On Steam Deck, accept the auto graphics profile and set FSR to Quality before you start manually tweaking sliders.
• If Part I's 2023 PC reputation is what is holding you back, know that patches through v1.1.5 (July 2025) rewrote most of what made that launch rough.
• Confirm 100GB free for Part I and 150GB for Part II Remastered before you start either download, and put both on an SSD if you have the option.